Overview
Commentary
Spiritual possession is a way for us to try and model behaviors that seem too far out of the ordinary for us to understand. If someone presents with symptoms of schizophrenia and hears voices, without a neurobiological explanation, we might conclude that they’re attuned to a different space of consciousness than the rest of us where other beings exist. Dreams can be interpreted as visions, messages, or warnings. Seizures or dissociative identity disorders might be considered the result of another consciousness intruding into the body. “Antisocial” behaviors might be seen as the result of malicious influence, such as the Devil tempting people into sin when they follow a compulsion or sirens luring sailors when long isolation causes them to hear things. PTSD flashbacks could be seen as lingering spirits stuck in the past with “unfinished business” that take over someone’s body. After all, to the person who presents these behaviors, their experiences are as real and impactful as anything else in their life.
Scientific discoveries don’t necessarily make mental health easier to understand either. Arguably, since the Enlightenment era, we’ve become more convinced of the mind-over-matter paradigm; if we can just identify the material cause of a problem, we just need to make the rational decision to choose a material solution. This paradigm encourages the perspective that you’re defined primarily by your cognition which governs your body’s behavior, so the responsibility for your behavior lies with your willpower to change your mind to change your behavior. Being impacted by your environment comes to be seen as a kind of vulnerability or even flaw that you have to find the internal resources to overcome.
The metaphor of spiritual possession persists as a way to discuss our minds, our consciousnesses, and our behaviors when we lack rational explanations. We stay in toxic and abusive relationships even when we know we should establish boundaries. We’re scared to fly even though it’s far more statistically safe than driving. We resist seeing the doctor because we’re more scared of being judged than suffering from a treatable illness. We buy things we don’t particularly want or need just because they’re on sale. We know we’ll regret saying something mean that we can’t take back, but we do it anyways. We know social media platforms lead to doomscrolling but keep them on our phones. We’ll refuse to believe surveys in favor of a close friend’s anecdote. We’ll do something self-destructive just to spite someone we don’t like. We’ll do something stupid and dangerous to get the attention of someone we do like. Studies show we tend to eat more when people around us eat more too, even though their stomachs have nothing to do with ours. We’ll give contradictory advice to people who won’t listen anyways. We think infinite growth is possible even though we live in a finite world.
By externalizing these behaviors as a spirit, we can discuss them without the same expectations we reserve for individuals. We might expect someone with depression to take rational steps to improve their mood or someone with substance abuse disorders to reliably summon the willpower to abstain, but by reframing the issue as an entity that attacks the rational consciousness that we assume defines us, we can better communicate the non-rational influences we battle with.
The Babadook is one of the best examples of this. A single mother struggles to keep her life together after losing her husband and receives very little empathetic support in her life. Her job still expects her to show up, she can’t relate to her friend group’s daily lives anymore, doctors prescribe medications that don’t address her underlying suffering, child protective services grow concerned not about her but whether she’s an adequate guardian, her son is overactive with behavioral issues, etc. In the middle of all this, she begins to be plagued by a spirit that seems to want to drive her insane until she violently attacks her son. The director described her motivation as wanting to depict “the fear of going mad” through the darkness within us in the middle of something as romanticized as parenthood.